Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

To my mind the KDE desktop is out-dated and legacy, not something we should make a glorified example of Things Done Right.

I don't know how since KDE is actually a Unix/Linux desktop that works and has the underlying framework to make what they did with KDE 4 (i.e. keeping pace with Vista/7/OS X) onwards sustainable. From that point of view it is certainly an example of Things Done Right(tm).

If KDE is outdated and legacy I really have no idea what that makes Gnome, or where that puts the state of open source desktops.